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Digital Growth Strategies for Businesses on a Strict Budget

Digital marketing offers the best tool for growth when it comes to a results per dollar spent. We know that’s a bold statement. We’re still making it.

In this connected age of digital advertising, budgets of nearly any size can generate results. When you use the right approach to maximize that budget, then your dollar can go even farther towards helping your business increase its customer base and subsequent revenues.

To help you get started, here are some specific, growth-focused digital marketing tactics you can adopt when you want real results for as efficiently as possible.

Perform a SEO Audit

SEO (search engine optimization) aims to improve your number of site visits or offer sign ups you get by optimizing the pages on your website to matching popular search engine keywords.

But SEO doesn’t have to be a big-budget extravaganza. In fact, something as simple as spending an afternoon fixing broken links on your website can translate to improved traffic.

So how do you get started? Look to your business’s primary keyword — the thing you hope to rank for above everything else. It should be something intrinsic to your core business offerings and area, such as “gardening store in Austin, Texas,” or “personal injury lawyer in Sandusky, Ohio.” Then, check your home page to see that the search term appears in:

When you’re done with that, you can then find that phrase in other pages and insert a hyperlink between it and your home page or main “Services” page. Now, pick a secondary phrase for a sub-business offering, like “garden supplies in Austin, TX,” or “slip and fall lawyer in Sandusky” and then repeat the process.

Look at your current customer base, and then develop some theories on how you might lump them all into a few similar categories. It could be age, region, related interests, or even an interest in certain products or brands. Then, from your general customer group, make a guess as to a few types of customers who spend the most money.

You can pinpoint your ideal customer group by creating a few experimental campaigns and comparing the results with a more general campaign. Keep an eye out for who converts most readily to a purchase, not just those who click more often.

Reviewing campaign data can also teach you what times of the day your ads get the most engagement, whether you should filter out negative keywords, etc. In this way, you use less and less of your budget to get higher returns as you pinpoint the optimal positioning for your paid search ads.

Best of all, what you learn through AdWords can translate to other campaigns, like social.

Use Facebook Ads and Graph Search for Ultra-Niche Targeting

AdWords ads generate more impressions than social media, giving you more data to prove or disprove your A/B testing hypotheses. However, social media has even better targeting thanks to the rich amounts of data we share online. So, you can take lessons learned from AdWords and generate bigger returns on social with a slimmer budget.

In this department, Facebook reigns supreme for many small businesses. By promoting posts to a custom audience, you can show your messaging to the exact people whom you think are most likely to become customers. Create an action-oriented post, and then put a small budget towards a custom audience with your traits learned from AdWords experiments.

Remember that you can also import your email list to see who your customers are on Facebook and find look-alike audiences.

Digital Growth Strategies Mean Getting a Lot From a Little With Audience Targeting

By fixing your SEO, testing audience traits on AdWords and using what you learn to create social media campaigns, you can begin to maximize online conversions from just a little bit of spend.

If you are interested in learning more strategies for achieving digital marketing success, take a look at our other informative digital marketing blog posts, or reach out to us for digital marketing services tailored exactly to your needs and budget.